At-home retreat resources

Registration is now open for at-home retreat resources that will be provided beginning on Ash Wednesday (February 13) 2013. The Orientation material is already posted for anyone who wants to begin thinking about how they might design their retreat. 
See http://shalomplace.org/retreat  for more information and registration options.

Early registration is $15; after February 13 it will be $17.

St. Apollonia (d. 249): February 12

   The persecution of Christians began in Alexandria during the reign of the Emperor Philip. The first victim of the pagan mob was an old man named Metrius, who was tortured and then stoned to death. The second person who refused to worship their false idols was a Christian woman named Quinta. Her words infuriated the mob and she was scourged and stoned.
   While most of the Christians were fleeing the city, abandoning all their worldly possessions, an old deaconess, Apollonia, was seized. The crowds beat her, knocking out all of her teeth. Then they lit a large fire and threatened to throw her in it if she did not curse her God. She begged them to wait a moment, acting as if she was considering their requests. Instead, she jumped willingly into the flames and so suffered martyrdom.
   There were many churches and altars dedicated to her. Apollonia is the patroness of dentists, and people suffering from toothache and other dental diseases often ask her intercession. She is pictured with a pair of pincers holding a tooth or with a golden tooth suspended from her necklace. St. Augustine explained her voluntary martyrdom as a special inspiration of the Holy Spirit, since no one is allowed to cause his or her own death.

Varmints in my Vinegar Cup: a Childhood at Gilette State Hospital, 1945-50, by Lucille Gessinger, OSB.  Duluth Benedictine Books, 2009.

   "Among the many things we human beings require for survival and growth, one is not so generally recognized: the need I have to tell my story and have another person hear it." (Michael Casey)
   The author wanted to tell a long lost cousin (and the world) "something about the heart of me, where I had come from, when, what I have experienced, and where I was headed."
   This page turner tells the story of Jeannette Geisinger in a little town in Minnesota who, at the age of eight, developed a fever and a limp from a painful right thigh.  After being treated by her local doctor, she was eventually sent to Gilette State Hospital where she remained for five years to be treated for polio.  
   This five-year exile from her parents and siblings is carefully recorded. The author tells the various treatments, the heavy cast she had to wear, and the many other patients who became her friends in pain, joy, and then escapades of playfulness.  She suffered many disappointments, much homesickness, problems with the doctors and the nurses, enduring it all while marking the time she could return to her family.
   In the epilogue, dated 2009, the author tells how she became Sister Lucille in a Benedictine convent and spent several years as a classroom teacher. Eventually, because of diminished health, she became a medical records technician and later a director of the Spiritual Resource Center at her monastery's library.
   This book records a journey of faith and it is written to show the great courage of a child afflicted by polio who later became a religious and served the church in various ways.